From ringfort to ring road: The destruction of Ireland’s fairy forts Some of these ancient mounds date back to 3000 BC, but many are buried under motorways
From ringfort to ring road: The destruction of Ireland’s fairy forts Some of these ancient mounds date back to 3000 BC, but many are buried under motorways
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I say this a lot. We need to use our unused railway lines for infrastructure and not for greenways. Open them and use electric trains. Make using them affordable. Reduce the dependency on roads and fossil fuels.
‘Many’ of them are absolutely *not* buried under motorways. A few maybe, but there are literally thousands of them – and the vast majority are archaeologically insignificant. [This](https://i.imgur.com/eAQVJUH.png) is a screenshot from the
Historic Environment Viewer provided by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, showing the stretch of motorway running through east Galway. Our landscape is *littered* with history. Some sites are, of course, affected, but nothing happens in that regard without appropriate investigation first.
Cars and fuel corporations need their profits so sorry.
I resent them being called fairy forts. They really were utilised enclosures and not some magic nonsense.
A lot of the folklore around avoiding them was because even up til the 1950s they were used as burial grounds for the unbaptised and premature infant remains. Calling them fairy grounds hides the truths to this.
My brother has one on his land, it was always on it and they would never go near it. Bad luck etc.
It wasn’t a fairy fort either. It’s at the top of a huge hills and you can see for miles around you. I am sure if you actually dug down you would find bones etc from the people that lived in it many centuries ago.
Archaeological site assistant here. There are 10s of thousands of ring forts on this island. A tiny proportion would have been interfered with in the motorway construction of the 2000’s. Road planners honestly try their best to avoid them, they do not want expensive excavations to take place if they can avoid it. They can be hard to avoid though as there are so many of them (along with other archaeological sites) in this country.
At least with proper excavation of those sites we have found out a lot more about them and there role in society.. Pretty valuable information.
Of course farmers, landowners etc willingly destroying them without permission or proper excavation is another thing entirely.
>32,000 remaining ringforts
Pick a few, protect them, then go away, we dont need an archeology dig for a ringfort everytime someone wants to build something